Sneak preview of Trade Magazine Week

After teasing this for a long time, we're finally ready to roll out Trade Magazine Week!

This week, we're opening digital access to a collection of nearly 400 video game trade magazines. For video game historians, this is some of the juiciest material. And we should probably explain why!

What is a trade magazine?

Most video game magazines were sold to the public. If you went to the store and picked up Game Informer or Electronic Gaming Monthly, you would get news about the latest video games and hardware. If you got a magazine like Next Generation, you might get some harder-hitting coverage about the state of the game industry. But for the most part, you're getting news that's relevant to you as a consumer.

Trade magazines were different. They were meant for the professionals. Their biggest audience was actually retailers, to give them a better idea of where the market was going. Instead of reviewing games, they would talk about their sales potential, or how C-suite shakeups could impact the business.

Nowadays, there's less separation between these two types of press. But in the era before the internet gobbled up magazines, trade mags were where the inside baseball of the game industry happened.

So why are you doing Trade Magazine Week?

Trade magazines have been one of our top priorities since we launched the digital library this year. After we received a substantial trade mag donation (which we'll explain below!), we decided there was enough material to make a theme week out of it.

We know that flipping through pages of 25-year-old business report is not most people's idea of a good time, so we wanted to make this a fun opportunity to talk about why these are valuable sources for research. Hence the XTREME theming at the top of this post.

Every day this week, we'll be spotlighting a couple different magazines and explaining why they're interesting. Many of the magazines we're sharing this week has never been seen by or shown to the public before!

What we're rolling out

There's two big collections we're launching this week, plus a couple smaller ones! The big boys are...

• Games Business, a bimonthly trade magazine published from 1998–2000.

  This magazine was published by Imagine, the folks behind Next Generation, PSM, PC Gamer, and more. Out of all the trade mags, this is one of the most interesting. On top of their in-depth coverage of the launches of the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2, they landed candid interviews with figures like Shigeru Miyamoto, Electronic Arts executive vice president Bing Gordon, and Sega of America president Bernie Stolar.

  Our digital collection has every single issue of Games Business, which we spent years tracking down by talking with former editors, industry professionals, and historians. None of these have been scanned before!

• MCV and Develop, two major trade magazines in the UK.

  We received several hundred digital issues of MCV and Develop from former editor James Batchelor! He worked for MCV from 2008–2013, and Develop from 2013–2016. We estimate that this is over 15,000 pages of video game news from the tail end of the Wii/Xbox 360/PS3 generation.

And for the others...

• Electronic Gaming Retail News, an early 90s trade magazine from Sendai Publishing, the company behind Electronic Gaming Monthly. With help from our friend Chris Kohler, we've been able to digitize all but one issue of this magazine.

• E3 Show Daily, a daily newspaper handed out at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. We're still working on this one, but we've scanned 1998, as well as most issues from 2010–2016.

• Videogame Advisor, a monthly magazine for retailers published from 1995–1997. We've scanned most issues from 1995–1996. VGA evolved into...

• GameWEEK, a weekly magazine for retailers! We had previously scanned about a dozen issues of this magazine but had not yet put them in our digital library.

• Game Intelligence, an unsuccessful independent trade magazine that ran for three issues. We have only seen five copies of Game Intelligence, ever, and we own all of them.

We're also taking this opportunity to put up a few other non-trade magazine collections we've been processing, such as...

• EGM2 (aka Expert Gamer, aka GameNOW), a spinoff of Electronic Gaming Monthly focusing on game tips, import game coverage, and other specialty topics and news updates that didn't make the main magazine.

• Play, a specialty magazine focusing on import games and anime, which ran from 2002–2010. Although frequently controversial and combative (they famously gave Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 an 8.5/10), their focus on niche hardcore-fan interests was unique in print media. To our knowledge, this was the first game magazine that ran a cover story on a Persona game.

• A collection of lifestyle magazines that covered video games, like Guitars and Gaming, a special issue of Guitar One magazine); Christian Comics & Games Magazine, which has one of the only known reviews of the DOS game Captain Bible; and the infamous issue of Maxim that described the poker video game Stacked as "Halo with chips."

Phew! There's a lot we've been working on, and we hope Trade Magazine Week is a fun occasion for sharing it all, rather than just trickling it out quietly.